Shame on us that the website hasn’t been updated since April! Lets play a bit of catch up. Here are links to the updates we’ve provided via our Kickstarter page between that last post and today. June 1st – An Army…

Greetings friends of Ray! First off – We are super excited about the milestone we’ve just completed. Over the weekend, for the first time we were able to play the entire game from beginning to end. This means all levels…

We have two exciting pieces of news to share! First off, Ragtag Studio and Adult Swim Games have joined forces to bring Ray’s the Dead to the world! That’s right, the outstanding publisher of all things weird and wacky, Adult…

Its about time we stopped in for a little info drop in our July update! Progress June was a good productive month for us. We had two primary goals: To arrive at a content complete status, and to get our…

First off – We are super excited about the milestone we’ve just completed. Over the weekend, for the first time we were able to play the entire game from beginning to end. This means all levels and features are designed, implemented, and fully playable. Very exciting!

Now, while that might make it sound like we are very close to done, the truth is we still have a lot of work ahead of us to take the game from what it currently is, to something that looks and plays great from beginning to end. But the bright side is that the vast majority of the questions are answered, so we can finally concentrate on taking everything we have and polishing it to a shiny sheen. We are very happy to be at this point!

Preparing for Liftoff

With that milestone in our rear view, we have begun planning for the final phase of development. One of the most important things we will be doing is a massive round of revision on our combat and movement. We’ve compiled a giant document filled with suggestions for improvement and have begun the process.

After spending a bit of time improving our combat, and revisiting and polishing up our levels, we will begin heavy playtesting. To coincide with that, we hope to begin to distribute certain levels of the game to those of you that backed our project at the Alpha level. We don’t have any set dates for that just yet, but we’ll give more information on that in future updates.

Ray’s the Dead Public Appearances

In the last couple of months we’ve shown Ray’s the Dead at a couple of public events, including the Indie MIX during GDC out in San Francisco, and at SXSW in Austin, TX.

Both were great experiences, at totally different ends of the spectrum. The Indie MIX gave us a chance to talk with press and other developers about the game, while SXSW was primarily kids and families playing the game. All feedback was equally valuable and important. We are very happy with the response we received.

Some of you have been asking if we will be attending PAX East this year. The answer is no, we will not be at PAX East. Sorry to disappoint!

That’s all we have for this update. We’ll update again when we have more to share.

We wanted to get one more update out to you before the end of the year. So here it is!

Ray’s the Dead at PSX

First! A quick reminder that Shawn, Aenne, and Chris will be at PSX in San Francisco this weekend (Dec 5th and 6th) to demo Ray’s the Dead! We’ll be in the Adult Swim booth. If you’ll be there, please stop by and say hello! If you don’t we’ll be sad. I hear there may be some exclusive posters handed out…

Progress Update

The story of Ray’s the Dead will take place across 5 Chapters. Each chapter consists of anywhere from 4 to 9 levels. At the moment, Ray’s the Dead will have somewhere between 30 – 35 levels. (though this number fluctuates up and down all the time)

For the last couple of months we have been holding tight to a strict schedule that has us getting each chapter of the game, one by one, to a point where we can start putting it in the hands of others for playtesting. This is no small feat as it requires nearly every aspect of the levels to be (pretty much) done.

The biggest challenge we’ve had to overcome in this process is making sure everything from gameplay mechanics to story elements are clearly presented to the player. It can be a hard lesson, but when you work on something for so long, you forget that that everything you know about the game isn’t always apparent to those that are playing the game for the first time.

There are a number of reasons this has been such a challenge. Ray’s the Dead has a really unusual type of gameplay that can be hard for players to wrap their heads around. Also, Ray’s the Dead features a rather intricate story, starring a cast of characters that can’t even talk! So needless to say we’ve had our fair share of challenges to overcome.

Between our work on the demo, and the back and forth with Adult Swim on the chapters we’ve been submitting, we’ve made tremendous progress on this critically important aspect of the game. But we still have a ways to go!

Anyway, we are wrapping up our work on Chapter 3 this week. So we thought we’d celebrate by teasing with a vine, and a gif. I’ll just leave these here without further comment. Enjoy!

That’s right, the outstanding publisher of all things weird and wacky, Adult Swim Games will be publishing Ray’s the Dead on PlayStation4, PlayStation Vita, PC, Mac, and Linux. We feel this is a match made in heaven, and are thrilled to be working with each other.

In future updates, we’ll be talking more about the relationship. Why we decided to work together, and how this will benefit Ray’s the Dead. For now, please rest assured that both Ragtag Studio and Adult Swim Games want nothing more than to make Ray’s the Dead the best game it can be!

I did say we had TWO exciting pieces of news to share didn’t I?

Ray’s the Dead will be making its long awaited public appearance at PAX Prime in Seattle this weekend!

Ray’s the Dead will be available to play at not one, but TWO different booths! You can try our 20 minute demo at both the Adult Swim Games booth (6th floor #6111), as well as the Sony booth (4th floor #222). If you are attending PAX, please stop by and say hi! Matt, Shawn, Aenne, and Chris will be spending time at both booths ready to greet you with a smile and open arms. Hope to see you there!

Its about time we stopped in for a little info drop in our July update!

Progress

June was a good productive month for us. We had two primary goals: To arrive at a content complete status, and to get our engine upgraded to Unity 5.

Well, the Unity 5 upgrade was completed. It’s great to have that knocked out, as it has a lot of nice features that will greatly benefit the game.

The downside is it was a bigger ordeal than we expected, taking over a week to wrap up. This means we haven’t yet arrived at the content complete status we were hoping to reach by July 1st. We are still hacking away at it and hope to make it this month.

The majority of what we’ve been plowing through are getting all of the levels blocked out and playable with all features accounted for. They aren’t pretty yet, but the entire game is nearly together. Here is a look at some of the blocked out levels.

NOTE: These are just simple representations of the levels to lay out the gameplay, they in no way represent their final visual quality.

UI

Last month, we promised we’d give a little update on the UI. The super talented Cef Grima has been concepting up our in-game UI elements. There will be three primary pieces of information that are frequently visible on screen: the health and energy bars, the zombie select icons, and the dialogue box. Below, you’ll see Cef’s most recent representation of Ray’s Health and Energy bars.

At the moment, these are nothing more than static images. In the coming weeks, we’ll be implementing these in game as fully functional representations of Ray’s Health and Energy. Please let us know what you think!

What’s next?

We have two big goals for the remainder of July. One being a continuation of last months goal of arriving at a content complete status. Once we accomplish that, we’ll be in a position to begin to polish and fine tune both the art and gameplay. In conjunction with the polish, we will finally be putting together a proper demo that will allow us to show at various conventions. If all goes well, Ray will finally begin making public appearances again in the near future.